Ever Wondered About…. Klout

Wondering how your Tweeting rates? Ever asked yourself how likely you are to be retweeted?
What type of Twitterer are you?

This is where you can find out just how much clout you have.

Klout is a free online tool that measures your Twitter influence based on what messages you send out, how often, how much engagement you have on that message and who engages with you.

Why should I care?

Megan Berry, marketing manager at Klout, explains: “In a larger sense [we measure] engagement. How many people are actively participating and interacting with you?”

Klout scores look “at the types of messages you tend to send out (links or not, conversations or not, etc.), your activity level, how much engagement you have for every message and in general, who interacts and engages with you and other factors to determine their influence style.”

Taking into account 25 variables, your score is broken down into three categories, to give you a score out of 100 for each in each of these areas:

True Reach: the size of your engaged audience

Amplification Score: the likelihood that your content will be acted in and,

Network Score: the influence level of your engaged audience.

These scores are then combined to give you your Klout Score, the measurement of your overall influence. If you’re new to Twitter, it’s a perfect way to track your progress.

Klout lets you know who you are mostly influenced by and who you are an influencer of. It even analyses your content.

Our view? We think the most useful feature is the Influence Matrix, which provides context by classifying what type of Twitterer you are. It’s like a personality test for your influence. There are 16 categories based on the extent to which you participate, how focused your tweets are, whether you share or create content and how often you tweet. Are you a curator? An exlorer? A dabbler? Or a mighty thought leader?

It’s definitely worth looking into. Once you know what your style is, it’s easy to think about goals for where you want to be. More on those influence styles here.

Ever Wondered About is a new series on the Wisdom London blog, where Kate Spiers and Jill Ruthenberg aim to demystify and explore what’s shaping our social interactions. Coming up: Ning, Paper.li and PPC. Wondering about anything else? Tell us and we’ll investigate!